Overview:
The Desert of Exile is a custom AoS map for WC3: The Frozen Throne created by Rising_Dusk with the help of a bunch of happy artist friends and set in the Barrens tileset. It's a relatively new map as far as AoS maps go, and didn't aim to reinvent the idea of the AoS so much as just make what we already know funner. Massive credits go out to Tides of Blood for being awesome and an inspiration to all good AoS makers of our day and age. The story is a prelude to the events in Advent of the Zenith, my first AoS map.

Features:

6v6 gameplay!

49 items in total!

Thirty fun heroes to play across two teams!

A more graceful way to hire units, making huge pushes or spreading them out over time possible.

A condition system inspired by RPG games of old that allows for incredible hero and spell interaction.

The map is based around PvP, but done in a way that the game starts at level 1, and ends at level 18.

Assistance given for hero kills!

Fun, hero-driven gameplay that keeps you interested!

Replayable as hell!

Comments:
The map features many exclusive skins created by members of this very community. Special thanks to KrewL_RaiN, AnemicRoyalty, Nirvana_87, and unwirklich for all the hard work they have put into the map. Really, DoE would be nowhere today without the support of all of the artists. The list of who did what is all in the map credits (Quest Log).

This is likely to be the last major update to DoE for awhile, but I wanted to get it all fixed up and done before submitting it to the database. If you have any bug reports, balance complaints, angry fanmail, etc. please respond to this thread and let me know. I cannot continue to make the map funner to play if no one tells me what they want fixed!

Wow, you certainly put alot of hard work into this ver :p
I do hope you continue updating it & its truly beginning to approach the epic status.

The greatest change I think is the items, just by glancing over them there seems to alot more potential & there all very very useful now.
Alot of item builds have now opened up.

The updated skins are fantastic, the new Arro Kree one is simply amazing & my favourite.

The new Heroes looks very interesting, I really like the way you cleverly mixed in some blizz skills with conditions, such as the Cleave ability.
Oh btw what happened to that chain/bouncing Life Syphon you was talking about? :p

===

A few bugs have appeared thou.

Vision
I was bane but The vision went to Order & few others complained as well.

Crash
Andriejj has commented on a game crash.
According to him Kassar is what causes it.

====

A few critiques/questions, although I've only played it once so far.

- Both hero kills and assists now give players only 1 faction
I assume your encouraging team work, but 3 guys killing someone gaining more than 1 guy killing someone, does sound a little strange?
Perhaps 2 for solo, 1 if shared?

- Hero revive times are now 30 seconds at all levels
Woa, this seems like a heavy penalty for low level Heroes & especially new players.
Won't this lead to a level 1 Hero dieing falling terribly behind in experience, gold etc.?

Thats all for now, with some more games I'll give better feedback.
Keep uo the good work Dusk, this map serves as a great inspiration to us all, of what a vision & hard work can achieve!

- Hero revive times are now 30 seconds at all levels
Woa, this seems like a heavy penalty for low level Heroes & especially new players.
Won't this lead to a level 1 Hero dieing falling terribly behind in experience, gold etc.?

Yeah... I mean the noob who gets caught standing in Genobee's impale at lv 1 will be ass-raped for the rest of the game.

- Hero revive times are now 30 seconds at all levels
Woa, this seems like a heavy penalty for low level Heroes & especially new players.
Won't this lead to a level 1 Hero dieing falling terribly behind in experience, gold etc.?

Who says its a penalty?

It merely means that even if your lvl 18 you won't have to wait for forever

and if your good enough umm...it isnt that hard to level up, it really isnt, 30 seconds isnt a long wait, and uh, if you can't get back up in exp(gold isn't enourmously important, and the sharing system makes it not a problem now)
then obviously your a noob and don't know what your doing, and your gonna get pwnd anyway.

What I don't understand, is why are heroes muted 2 seconds rather than being invulnerable after reviving?

My guess is that if your base is safe it won't really matter, but if its under attack by the bane or vice versa, it will make it harder to defend and therefore will make it harder to prolong the game

30 second revives at all levels go by pretty fast, I think. In all of my testing, death at any stage of the game puts you a few behind the rest of the players, and level 1 is no different. The nice thing about 30s revives at all levels is that players don't get ripped out of the game for 72s when they die at maximum level -- This allows them to put a lot more time into playing the game, rather than waiting to play the game.

And I've been receiving loads of reports of some minor and some serious things across the map, so I'll address them all in a .09b as soon as I can. No sweat guys, I'm dedicated to this thingy. :p

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fulla

I assume your encouraging team work, but 3 guys killing someone gaining more than 1 guy killing someone, does sound a little strange?
Perhaps 2 for solo, 1 if shared?

I quite like this approach I have, though, because it rewards the team with more net faction gain the more help you have in an assist. Rather than splitting some amount of faction between users when you kill a hero, you get more the more that help, so even new players will have a tendency to follow others around or gank for the kills. (So I've noticed in public testing)

I think this is definitely the way I wanted to take DoE, so I like it. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fulla

Crash
Andriejj has commented on a game crash.
According to him Kassar is what causes it.

Yes, this appears to be the only critical bug so far. I'll definitely address it and quickly so that it doesn't impede your playing pleasure too much!

Just played it with the clannies.
Very well done Dusk, but we already expected that. =P

I like what you've done with Jhita by the way, awesome. Who textured him?
---
Is Dis supposed to revive with burn? I wasn't playing him but the person who was revived with burn, I don't know if it's supposed to happen or if it's an overall bug.

EDIT: Oh and yea, why 1 faction overall? Now I can just sit by my uber kickass teammates and watch them pwn shit. D:

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Ok I tested it in a beautiful full house game.

The skins are the catch aspect of this game, your artist staff definitely must be very proud of the outcome :)

I started with random hero and I got Janice. Her skills were all beautifully well done, and after higher levels, she became very powerful faction machine(added two rings of agility 2 rings of attack speed and the rest of slots in my inventory free for healing potions) and she was a killing machine, a faction machine.

Then in the second game (a rematch) I've got Genobee, very nice, a money machine, impressive.

I suggest to add indicators (like in AotZ) into the map about where are the shops, it really helps to the newcomers to get their locations and it would help to reduce more the learning curve of your map.

At the end I noticed that one hero (Jhita) used an ability called "En fuego". The description has grammatical mistakes, it should be:

I suggest to add indicators (like in AotZ) into the map about where are the shops, it really helps to the newcomers to get their locations and it would help to reduce more the learning curve of your map.

One step ahead of you Moy. If you take a time to look around the map, you'll notice that there are indicators at all of the shops. They appear in game and use the circle of power blip icon, so it works really well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by moyack

A normal complain in this game was the lag, probably for the usage of several effects at the same time.

A few of the new heroes have some minor lag issues that I need to work out, nothing too crazy for me, though. :)
I'm glad you enjoyed it though, I'll check out the replay when I get the chance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sabertooth_X

EDIT: Oh and yea, why 1 faction overall? Now I can just sit by my uber kickass teammates and watch them pwn shit. D:

1 faction with regard to what? Buildings give faction to encourage you to siege in order to pimp-your-hero. Works pretty darned well I'd say. Hero kills give 1 faction to make assists/kills equally valuable to the game. There's no more "AMG KS" with this in mind.

And KR did Jhita's skin, but you would've known that if you'd looked at the quest log. :p